Black & White, Jul. 18, 2002

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Mental Hygiene
By Jane Longshore

College friends William Pearson (a Birmingham native) and Mangesh Hattikudur are skipping the typical service industry jobs and sabbaticals out West that await most recent college grads and moving straight into the publishing mogul arena. Mental Floss is the general interest magazine that the two created as an on-campus 'zine while they were students at Duke University. Upon graduation last year, they decided to take a crack at turning it into a career. "We
took it to Big Top Newstand Services, a distributor in San Francisco," Pearson explains. "They liked the idea and agreed to help us put out a few pilot issues." They and their small staff recently published the fourth of these pilot issues, and have received such a positive response that they are planning to start publishing bimonthly in November, and hope to move to monthly publication in the near future.

Mental Floss presents trivia and knowledge about a wide-ranging variety of topics, both light-hearted and academic, in issues such as "The 10 Issue," "The Genius Issue," or "The Spy Issue." "What we try to do is take the chore out of learning by blurring the lines between a great education and great entertainment," says Pearson. "We feel like people want to feel smart, they want to feel well-educated, but they also want that process made simple. Whether we're covering anything from black holes to the dead sea scrolls, we try to take these topics that people feel like they should understand and bring them to a level that is accessible to them." Hence the magazine's tagline: "Feel Smart Again." The most recent issue includes articles entitled, "7 Stories That Shaped World Religion," "Can Science End World Hunger?" "Feel Art Again: Kandinsky, Klee, and the Bauhaus," and "The Dialogue of Dance: Capoeira." "We decided when we began the magazine that we would have to find a crew of writers that could tackle these difficult subjects in a way that the general public would accept," Pearson says. "A lot of them come from books that have done similar things, like the 'Dummy' series or the Dorling Kindersley series."

In previous times, the logistics of publishing a magazine whose staff was spread across the map would have proved insurmountable, but thanks to cyber-commuting, Pearson and Hattikudur have thus far been able to make it work. "We've been located throughout the country, with some of us in Delaware, some in Cleveland, some in Birmingham," Pearson says. "We just moved into an office in Five Points South, and we think the magazine will improve tremendously over the next couple of issues just because the staff is now together. But as far as us being in communication with the rest of the country, it really doesn't matter where you are." The decision to establish their headquarters in Birmingham was based on more than mere hometown roots, though. "Few people know that two of the world's largest [magazine] distributors are here in Alabama," Pearson explains. "There are also a number of resources for us with Books-A-Million based in Birmingham as well."

As they plan for the future of Mental Floss and prepare for their upcoming expansion, Pearson and his relatively inexperienced staff have availed themselves of guidance in the form of a heavyweight editorial advisory board that includes a former senior editor of Newsweek, the vice president of Books-A-Million, and the founder and vice-president of Magazines.com. "A few of them came from Duke connections, and a few of them came from our staff just e-mailing people and telling them about what we're doing," Pearson explains. "We tried to find advisors in a number of different areas of the industry. Take for example the founder of Magazines.com. We brought him on as an advisor more for a long-term internet strategy."

To hear this kind of talk coming from someone who just recently celebrated his 23rd birthday is more than a little unsettling. But, lest one dismiss this endeavor as impetuous youth at work, consider that their primary investors both quit long-time corporate careers to come on board with the magazine. "They'd been in the corporate world for about 20 years or so and stumbled into their dream job, or so they say, with Mental Floss," Pearson says. "That gave us a boost of confidence when they left pretty significant corporate jobs to come on full-time with us. Either that or we just found some really gullible people." Another shot in the arm came recently with the finalization of a book deal with HarperCollins. "We'll begin working on a book project in August," he explains. "The book will probably be called Condensed Knowledge: 1001 Things to Make You Feel Smart. It's the same idea behind the magazine."

The upcoming issue, to be published in August, is a milestone of sorts for the magazine. "Because we've put out pilots quarterly for one year, this will be our first anniversary issue," says Pearson. "It will also be the last of our quarterly publications because November begins our bimonthly publication schedule." The focus of the issue will be saints and sinners. "It's everything from Eastern saints to Western saints, how to become a saint in different religions, and some fun sidebars like 'The Seven Deadly Sins of Marlon Brando,' where we show how Marlon Brando has displayed each of the seven deadly sins in different movies." The issue will be available in local Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million stores.

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